Is Trump now part of the establishment? - BBC News

Donald Trump campaigned for president as the ultimate outsider, promising to unseat a corrupt and atrophied Washington establishment. Now, after two months in office, has he become the establishment? Are Trump and his team the insiders now?

One thing the recent collapse of healthcare reform efforts in the House of Representatives has revealed is just how quickly attitudes and alliances can shift in Washington, DC.

Last year Mr Trump and members of the House Freedom Caucus, a collection of 30 or so libertarian-leaning fiscal conservatives in Congress, were singing from the same anti-government hymnal.

Now, however, Mr Trump is the government - and he teamed up with congressional leadership to back a healthcare bill that conservative hard-liners believe didn't go far enough in undoing the 2009 Democratic-designed system.

The effort's failure set off back-and-forth sniping between Mr Trump and the Freedom Caucus that morphed into a classic insider-outsider faceoff, with Mr Trump cast as the new voice of the powers that be.